• Lawmakers get tough with truant teens
"Meet Jeff, Reformed Truant," Katherine Biele, Laura Gatland and Abraham McLaughlin, Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 1998, www.csmonitor.com.

A rise in truancy mirrored by a spike in crime rates has spurred lawmakers in many cities and states to take action against one of the fastest growing and most stubborn problems in the nation’s schools. In Nevada, for example, students with three unexcused absences can be fined $100 and have their driver's licenses suspended for up to 30 days. School-hour burglaries dropped about 25 percent and shoplifting went down 33 percent one year after Los Angeles enacted a daytime curfew in 1996 that prohibited students younger than 18 from being off campus between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Other states are developing truancy programs to which police can take truant students. One "tough love" truancy program in Utah makes students finish a long list of tasks, such as writing reports on books or completing math worksheets. Students who do not finish the tasks for that day must return the next day to complete them. Although almost one-third of the students return to the program twice, less than 10 percent come back a third time.

Minnesota note: In response to 1995 legislation, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office initiated the Truancy Intervention Program in all five school districts in the county for students age 12 to 16. This early intervention program, first, holds meetings with groups of parents of identified truants, then, if attendance does not improve, an individual attendance contract is negotiated with the parent and child. If truants fail to honor the contract, the parent and child are referred to the courts. Filings for truancy petitions have dropped almost 73 percent in the past two years. A total of 4,101 students from 70 schools have been processed through the program; 76 percent of them improved their attendance, according to the program’s 1996-1997 year-end report.

See another scan related to truancy in the June 1997 edition of Minnesota IssueWatch:
• Los Angeles truancy law contributes to daytime crime rate decline